I am currently preparing to take the LSAT next summer. I'm hoping to get advice as to whether or not my ability in Mandarin Chinese would help boost my application and if proficiency in Chinese is a marketable skill in regards to job placement after law school.

I know foreign languages are often seen as very "soft" skills but I have studied Chinese for over 8 years, including spending 2 years after undergrad in a fellowship program where I worked for one year as a university professor in Wuhan, China, and spent the next year at a Chinese consulting company in Beijing working in a Chinese-only environment. I would say that my speaking ability is "proficient" and that with a little familiarization with the vocabulary, reading legal Chinese would not be a problem.

What makes me much less employable (I assume) is that I don't want to live full-time in China. While I would have no problem doing rotations (even for years at a time) but I have no interest in spending the rest of my 20s, 30s, or beyond in China.

More background: I graduated from a T25 UG and my GPA is 3.55.

Any information would be helpful about how you see my situation would be helpful. Thank you in advance and let me know if anything could use further clarification.

Cmiles15 wrote:I'm hoping to get advice as to whether or not my ability in Mandarin Chinese would help boost my application and if proficiency in Chinese is a marketable skill in regards to job placement after law school.

Crowing wrote:Tbh I'd be interested if anybody had anything else to add about Mandarin fluency for he job market. I always assumed it was pretty useless since so many fucking people have that proficiency.

Not necessarily useless, there may be a lot of people with proficiency, but not those who have a US JD

Before law school I thought my near-native Chinese skills would give me a bump. I was completely wrong. Mandarin doesn't show up on USNews rankings, so there is no incentive to reward students with a second language kill. On the upside, Chinese will give you a huge boost in looking for a job (as long as you meet a firm's minimum GPA requirement--which are often much lower than the GPAs they actually recruit at). I ended up at a firm that I thought I had no shot at because they needed Chinese speakers (actually the ability to read/write legal Chinese is much more important than speaking skills).

Simply put, nail the LSAT and get into law school, then put your language skills to use.

+1. Mandarin is an increasingly important business language to know, so it can certainly make you appear more marketable to your future employer (depending on the scope of the firm). If you want to get your foot in the door with said employer, crush the LSAT and go to a great law school.